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Avoid OpenShot

I spent most evenings of the last two months creating a wedding movie from
about 150 single videos recorded with our camcorder.
The non-linear video editor I chose was
OpenShot, version 1.4.0 with libmlt 0.7.6.
I still regret it, even though we finally managed to finish the video.

I'll list allsome of the bugs that we came across in the 2 months,
and a better tool.

Frequent crashes

We had more than 350 crashes in the two months.
The last days were so bad that you could do about 1 action and save before
OpenShot crashed - e.g. add clip, save, crash.
Start OpenShot again, move clip, save, preview, crash.

Transition problem

When adding a transition (e.g. fade) between two video clips,
now and then the target clip is fully visible at the beginning of the
transition.

If that happens, the track is "tainted" and all following clip transitions
will have the same problem.
All of them. Every single one.

The only workaround is to add a new track and move all remaining
clips onto that.
For our movie, with a length of not quite an hour, we ended up
with 22 tracks.
Together with the frequent crashes, this was the total disaster.

Audio problems

On some scenes we added some ambient music with 25% or 30%
loudness.
When playing the preview (and the final rendered video), the
music was missing.

The problem here is localization
(and the OpenShot developers not being aware of it):
The English decimal point is a dot ".", while the German one is
a comma ",".
OpenShot (or MLT) expresses the volume as floating point number from
0.0 (no sound) to 1.0 (100% volume) or higher.
When OpenShot generates the MLT project file, a volume lower than 100%
generates a number like "0,25" with a German locale.
The MLT parser expects a dot as decimal point and throws away everything
it does not understand/expects, and this is the comma and everything behind.

To make it work, we had to start OpenShot in english:

$ LC_ALL=C openshot

Update:
Jonathan Thomas wrote that they are aware of locales, know about the
problems and are sure that the problem does not exist:

OpenShot works fine in every culture we've localized it for, including many
that use commas.

I still wonder why I clearly have the problems.

General slowness

That problem is not as bad as the following:
Clip/Videos properties window is too slow.
To change video and audio transition settings, or the loudness of a clip,
you need that window.
It takes three seconds(!) to close that window, which interrupts every
workflow.

For short movies only

The timeline view in OpenShot is your main work tool to arrange
videos, music and transitions.
It has a zoom setting which allows you to determine the resolution
you want to see:
Let 5 seconds of the timeline fill the screen?
That's ideal for fine-tuning transitions and clip alignments.
Let 30 minutes fill the screen?
Good to get an overview and jump quickly to a specific place.

Timeline only shows 320 times the zoom slider setting
breaks everything.
It means that you have the full detail zoom only for the first 10 minutes,
and need to use the 12 seconds setting to be able to access minutes
50-60.
With that bug, only coarse clip alignment is possible after the first
10 minutes.

Craftsmanship

So now you have 30 images and want to arrange them on the timeline
sequentially, and add a fade between each of them
- a classic slideshow.
Sounds simple?
It is - but not in OpenShot.

You have to do it manually.
Add each of them on the timeline.
Set the length for each of them
(remember the 3 seconds properties window problem).
Add a a transition for each of them.

Update:
Jonathan Thomas replied that OpenShot has this feature; I did not read the
manual properly:
In the file list, select many clips and right-click them.
Select "Add to timeline" and a new window will pop up.
Here you can add transitions that will be applied to all of them.
Unfortunately, the length is fixed to 5 seconds each picture,
which is not always what I need.

Binary blobs are in

Having no batch mode would not be that bad if I could modify the project
files by hand through writing some XML.
Unfortunately, the OpenShot developers decided to make it as hard as possible
for the users to use additional tools and use a binary project file format.

Update:
Jonathan Thomas wrote that OpenShot saves its files in a text-based format,
but unfortunately the tools I used (less, gedit
and file) told me it's binary.
Maybe it's because I started the project with OpenShot 1.3 - anyway,
I had the problem.

Various other issues

As if the bad bugs I listed up to here are not enough, did I encounter
many small usability issues.
Listed in no particular order:

It's the lib!

I got a mail from Jonathan Thomas (OpenShot developer) telling me my blog
article is unconstructive and that most of the problems I experienced are not
OpenShot's fault but that of MLT, the video library that is currently used.

While I can understand that technically, it is a reasoning that does not make
OpenShot better or more usable.
OpenShot crashes frequently, be it OpenShot itself or an underlying library
- I do not care. It just doesn't work.

An alternative

Some days ago I got some feedback from Mark Emerson:

I'm running on Debian and having virtually all of the major problems you
describe. I'm deep into a 1-hour, 60-file project now, and getting to
the "1 edit, save, crash" stage. I must decide whether to abandon my
editing and start over in another video editor. What editor do you
recommend?

After finishing this one movie, I ditched OpenShot and
have been using
Kdenlive
for the next two movies without any major problems.
If you are looking for a tool that let's you finish your movie, try it.

Other people

Tomasz Borek
has a totally different experience; he had no problems whatsoever
in mid 2013.

Another user, this time mid 2014:

Subject: Re: Avoid OpenShot
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 20:55:16 -0700

Dear Sir: I just wanted to relate my problems with Openshot.
I'm using v. 1.43 and didn't have any problems until I tried to open
my project after saving it.
Crashes the program every time.
I'm using Ubuntu 14.04_64.
I also tried to open my project with Mint 16-same result.